Women collectors of South Asia: gender, material culture and empire

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Women collectors and donors have made major contributions in terms of quantity and significance of objects to the museum collections across the world, including the British Museum, yet there has been no study thus far which examines their motivations, practices and networks. The South Asian collections at the British Museum provide an ideal case study around which to base a project exploring the gendered nature of collecting and donating as well as helping to reveal the agency of women in imperial and post-colonial contexts. This project will investigate the lives, collections, activities, writings and networks of women collectors and donors of material culture from South Asia to the British Museum and other collections in the UK. It will explore how and why women collected objects and what motivated them, how they acquired knowledge about their collections and the dynamics of their donation of objects to museums. With a focus on objects from South Asia as the starting point, the project will be set in a colonial and/or post-colonial context, during which South Asian, British and later British South Asian women negotiated the challenges of living under the British Empire and its aftermath. It will make an important and original contribution to our understanding of the British Museum, demonstrating how race, gender and empire influenced the forging of the collection. It will question how far collecting and engagement with material culture was a means for women to establish their own networks and how these aligned with or challenged racial and social divides in imperial and post-imperial settings. Using the British Museum as a starting point, it will trace the lives of selected women and their collections and donations to the BM as well as other museums. Objects themselves will be studied as well as associated archival material in the British Museum and other museum collections. Personal papers and publications will shed further light on the way in which women collected and donated, the networks within which they acted, intermediaries who assisted them and how this knowledge was disseminated. This is a timely project, as gender and material culture are increasingly central to our understanding of imperial history and it will break new ground in positioning women at the centre of the history of the museum collections.